April has been full of bullet journaling, music, food, workouts, and writing stuffs – at least on YouTube. The rest of April…well…she’s been tough on me. However, May has opened her arms to welcome me warmly. I am excited to start this month.

So, anyways, here’s my strange list of YouTube videos.

1 hour of Yoda – Rockin’ and Rollin’

This video grew on me. My husband played it for its full hour, and I found myself bopping along, writing. It helps grading, too.

Chris Baty: “No Plot? No Problem” | Talks at Google

I’m prepping for my NanoWriMo July Camp (outlining currently), and Chris Baty is the creator of NanoWriMo. He makes some good points about the creative process.

I’ve featured her here on this blog before. I love her personality and her workouts.

BROWNIES WHILE CUTTING: Low-Carb Protein Brownies

These look so good. I seriously want to try them. I typically don’t watch male health YouTubers because…well…I’m a female, and we need different things, but this guy grew on me fast. I watched a slew of his videos after this one.

Inside Amy Schumer – Last F**kable Day – Uncensored

One of my students wrote her mammoth research paper on agism and the how they differed for males and females. This was spot on for her argument. Plus, these ladies are hilarious.

Doodles with Circles : Harry Potter (Part 1)

I love doodles. I love Harry Potter. Enough said.

5 Days of Minimalism | Try Living With Lucie

One of my goals for the summer is to clear out some of the clutter in my house. As an anti-consumerist (until I walk into a bookstore), I love the idea of minimalism. But I have a lot of stuff. This gave me some nice ideas on my de-cluttering mission.

How To Build A Story | Brainstorming (1 of 5)

I love this chick. I watched all five of her videos on outlining and brainstorming, and I even took notes! Because I’m a dork. I’ve found it helpful in developing my outline for that NanoWriMo project I’m working on.

How to Defend against a Gun to the Face | Krav Maga Defense

So…I write a lot of fight scenes, and although I have no gun fights in my books…currently…I found this helpful. Always good to know how to defend oneself, too.

BONUS:

My press, Transmundane Press, has their first YouTube video. Take a look!

Hey, y’all. I’m starting a new blog theme about writing, editing, and publishing based on my role as editor for Transmundane Press, my experiencing teaching, and various other writerly ethos reasons. Let me know if you like them. I’ll know to keep writing them.

Writing Tip: Amp It Up. My personal take on conflict.

Conflict and tension are the fundamentals of fiction. Essentially, this is where the story begins. Traditional tensions are created through internal and/or external forces, usually characterized as man vs. man, man vs. nature or technology, man vs. society, man vs. God, man vs. self.

Empathy. Encourage reader identification with characters and scenarios that pleasantly or (unpleasantly) resonate with their own sweet dreams (or night sweats).

Insight. Reveal something about human nature.

Universality. Present a struggle that most readers find meaningful, even if the details of that struggle reflect a unique place and time.

High Stakes. Convince readers that the outcome matters because someone they care about could lose something precious. Trivial clashes often produce trivial fiction. (Source)

With this background in mind, tension should be present on the first page, hopefully within the first few words of a story, even when background information is needed (some might disagree with me here, but this is my personal preference as a reader, editor, and writer).

So let me lay out a few of my nitty gritty suggestions.

One: Every scene should have a clear and important purpose. Don’t show anything that doesn’t advance/complicate the plot or create tension. Don’t have stuff happen just to get to the next interesting part. Make it all interesting.

What does that mean? Well, more importantly, what doesn’t that mean? Don’t mistake slow action for a lack of tension. External and internal tensions should strike some balance. If you’re beating your characters hard, give them a moment to breathe, reflect, plan, and show how and why what’s happened to them before affects them and will affect them in the coming scenes.

Two: Into the Pot, Already Boiling, as coined by Jesse Lee Kercheval. This is a classic story opener that I learned about during my years as a graduate student. It’s one of three but always my go-to.

Why? Because you want to intrigue your readers right out of the gate. Doing so all but guarantees that your readers will hold on through the boring stuff…see note one…the slower stuff, the stuff that you need to properly set up the world. Just don’t keep them there for too long.

This also helps you avoid those clunky prologues and info-dumps. A lot can be shown to a reader through the narrator’s lens. What do they show the reader? How? Why? This develops character, scene, and background information without cutting the tension. Besides, a well-honed tone due to a character’s voice can do much more than this.

Three: Make promises and keep them. This is another classic bit of advice often referred to as Chekhov’s Gun. So deliver on your promises, but you know, just wait a while before you do.

What happens the night before a big change in your life (starting a new job, going to an interview, attending a concert, etc)? You can hardly sleep because you’re waiting for the event to come. (This happens to me every semester of college, waiting for the first day. Imagining the ways I’ll inappropriately set the mood for my classroom. This semester, I mistook a student saying poor for whore. Fiasco.)